Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:AgneseSS Chapter3 (section)

===Part 7===

Agnese and Lucia had identified the restaurant Angelene had entered, but carelessly approaching it now would mean losing their lives. Then they could not hope to save the girl trapped inside.

So they chose to attack a different location.

They captured the loafer watching on from a nearby rooftop and tied her up.

An observer like that would only have been waiting there if she had known from the beginning this would happen.

“Fucking Isabella, how about you tell us what exactly is going on here?”

“Oh, my. Is this kind of kinky stuff popular in the Agnese Forces right now? As nuns, you should really act more like proper servants of god.”

“How much did you know?”

This sting operation might seem to have begun when Agnese used a story she had heard to punish Angelene, but there was more to it than that.

Where had Agnese come by the information in the first place?

If they had been intentionally lured into this, it was worth tracking down the provenance of that information.

“Heh. Eh heh heh heh heh. I-I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Sister Lucia, give me a hand. I want to build a giant DIY seesaw that can launch her all the way to that restaurant.”

“For a siege catapult, wouldn’t we need to roll up some rope to build up strength?”

“I’d die, I’d die, I’d die, I’d die!” tearfully pleaded Isabella. “Ahh, are you still stuck in the era when they honestly believed you could stuff someone in a cannon and launch them to the moon!?”

“That’s a Voodoo demon, isn’t it?” coldly asked Agnese. “So wouldn’t you have some countermeasure against it?”

“Oh, no. I couldn’t do that. It doesn’t matter if you’ve mastered the Voodoo arts here. I mean, we’re talking about the Ceremony of Ba Moun of all things. Besides, this is a ''spell that someone created but can’t control''. All its abilities have been specialized toward granting your heart’s desire, safety be damned. Adding or removing anything to it would decrease its purity.”

“So it’s like a rocket built with a ‘to the moon or bust’ philosophy?”

“Yes, you might be half dead from heat and radiation, but you’d still set the record for the fastest manned flight, right? But decking out your ship with heavy lead panels is meaningless if won’t lift a single millimeter from the ground. Launching a rocket requires a lot of prior investment.”

It sounded crazy, but some people were in a situation so pressing they needed their wish granted ASAP. Like wanting to stop the giant meteor falling toward you, or wanting to save your sick and emaciated daughter. You couldn’t even wait a day longer for those wishes. And people had a way of feeling satisfied with even a halfway decent result. They would never rely on such a poorly-defined demon if their situation were not so pressing, but that very pressing situation left them unable to examine whether or not relying on that demon was really worth the price. Because if it failed even once, they would lose everything.

So person after person boarded that incomplete rocket to the moon, knowing it would leave them half dead. Just like people used to destroy their lungs with dust working in a mine to excavate a tiny piece of pure gold the size of their fingertip.

They were not in any position to properly consider the risks when they made the decision to try it.

They only learned the price they paid after the fact, once it was too late.

“But what does it even mean to ‘grant your heart’s desire’ here? That’s an extremely vague description.”

“When you look into it, it isn’t much.” The woman who smelled of death gave a thin and sticky smile. “The Voodoo specialty known as the zombie is not about making musty old corpses rise from the dead. You use special chemicals to intentionally harm someone’s body in order to remove the Ti Bon Ange from the five components of the soul. The spell is used to rob the person of their mind and remake them into a living unit you can control. The Ceremony of Ba Moun uses a demon as an amplifier to forcibly shift things up a level, bringing it from the micro to the macro. Simply put, it intentionally makes the physical world ill in order to control the diseased area. But that’s still only a small portion of the whole. The appendix is a tiny aspect of your physical body’s entire volume, right? And yet it can still bring you endless and excruciating pain until it is removed.”

“…”

“In Phase Theory terms, I guess you could call it ''corrupting'' the current phase instead of inserting a new phase of your own. But like I said, this spell has abandoned the entire concept of safety, so the ''corruption'' will reach the magician themselves sooner or later.”

That was very different from how Agnese viewed it.

Just like someone with a mastery of medicine might view medicines and poisons as the same basic thing, someone with a mastery of mythology might view gods and demons as the same basic thing. But Isabella’s way of combining Voodoo and Christianity inside her without any contradiction was not a thought process a nun could follow so easily.

The brown beauty herself seemed entirely carefree.

“Is there an affinity? You’d better believe it. Voodoo is a greedy religion that takes in every last miracle it runs across. I mean, they even include Yahweh as just one of their gods.”

“Enough talk.” Agnese sounded exasperated as she pointed her thumb toward the restaurant. “How exactly do you intend to solve this? We can’t lose Sister Angelene here.”

“Um, what do you think all that ‘talk’ was leading up to? If you were paying attention, you would have noticed I was going to great lengths to explain how the Ceremony of Ba Moun demon cannot be defeated.”

“Sister Lucia, prepare the catapult.”

“Okay, okay! I’ll figure something out, so just listen!!”

“Get to the point,” said Agnese in a voice much too threatening for a nun.

The necromancer put on a stiff smile and poked her index fingers together in front of her chest.

“Heh. Eh heh heh. Recall what our win condition is here. You just want to make sure those two survive even if we can’t defeat the demon, right?”

“I would have agreed to just saving Sister Angelene, but if you have it in your rotten heart to go that far, be my guest.”

“Then there is still a possibility.”

Isabella Theism lightly clenched a fist and struck the center of her chest with it.

She also winked and smiled.

“Did you forget I specialize in necromancy?”